Massive budget cuts to public education have exacerbated concerns about the quality of teaching and sinking student aptitude in math and science.
Ultimately, he said, he would like to move away from numerical measurements of student aptitude, and encourage a more "holistic" approach to evaluating candidates.
The new U.S. News/Raytheon STEM index shows that student aptitude for and interest in STEM increased just 4percentt between 2000 and 2010, while data from the National Science Foundation show the number of STEM jobs grew 20percentt.
Furthermore, if some of the increase in SAT scores was due to real increases in student aptitude, perhaps resulting from HOPE providing incentives to work harder in high school, then fully deflating will attenuate the coefficient more than it should.
When considered alongside regional variations, economic advantage, and a lack of consistency when it comes to measuring student aptitude, one can see a need for change, lest education become nothing more than recitation.
There was a strong effect of instructor on students' performance during the in-class writing, with some instructors achieving higher student scores than other instructors regardless of the treatment and controlling for student aptitude.
Just as faculty members evaluate graduate student candidates primarily on their previous significant research experience, faculty members could evaluate undergraduates on their experience in CUREs, allowing faculty members to more fairly compare student aptitude by using common criteria.
This was expected, because the multiple-choice scores were included in the analysis as a measure of student aptitude to allow us to partially control for that variable in comparisons among experimental treatments.
Even after correction of the GPAs for student aptitude, the results show statistically significant increases in cumulative GPA for students who enrolled in one or more UR courses for all students, as well as for both males and females, as compared with students who did not engage in research (Table 2).
We also evaluated the effect of student aptitude (the average score obtained in all exams on the multiple-choice questions) on student clicker scores (the average postclicker score that included the new question added at the end of the activity) using a Spearman correlation.
